Luce Irigaray

[serge gurkski]

Does the use of the past have a special significance in some circles? Maybe Derrida did that, or Lacan?

And if so? What is your point and how does it relate to my sentence quoted by you?

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I rarely take the time to find out biographical details about any writer, except for the general period in which they were writing -- I am a good student of Barthes, and I don't give much of a damn about the author him/herself. In this I find myself utterly in agreement with Luce -- knowledge of the writer's personal details should not influence the reader's appreciation or understanding of the text as an intellectual creation.

Then you are good a deal more postmodernist than I am. ;-) (they were not the only ones I know.) Sometimes I feel the need to get more info on the background of a text implying the writer. Sometimes not. I am not that much into generalizations anymore. This approach to treat texts as organisms on their own and independent of those who created them e.g. I find too extreme. Why not find a hopefully meaningful balance between the biographical and the postmodernist approach? Why not approach texts (fictional) as art and approach them each invidually? What method or combination of methods seems to fit best.